


Built to Last

by postapocalyptic_cryptic



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Couch Cuddles, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/F, Fluff, Helen is Long tm, Identity Issues, Interlude, Meta, Self-Reflection, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 09:40:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22967878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postapocalyptic_cryptic/pseuds/postapocalyptic_cryptic
Summary: Helen doesn't like ad jingles. Melanie just wants to stop thinking for a little while.
Relationships: Helen & Melanie King, Helen/Melanie King
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	Built to Last

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know there might be grammar errors. This is not about that, this is about two sad lesbians cuddling and talking at the end of the world.

Melanie absently ran a finger over Helen’s face, thumbing her cheekbones and the ridge of her brow, dipping a pinky into the hollow at the corner of her eye. Helen hummed and nuzzled her cheek against Melanie’s thigh. She wasn’t asleep (Melanie wasn’t sure if Helen _could_ sleep), but she was drifting, eyes closed and expression one of pure relaxed bliss. It was nice, being able to just exist like this. She knew she couldn’t hurt Helen, and Helen didn’t seem to mind her eccentricities and temper. She was neutral ground, and for the time being, that was all Melanie needed.

Helen’s eyes fluttered open at the ad break and she gave the television a look of such indignant confusion that Melanie couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Helen glared up at her as if daring her to explain. 

“What, did the Doritos commercial disturb your precious rest more than NCIS?”

Helen reached up and poked her with a blunted finger. “Yes. I don’t like the jingles.” She sat up and moved to drape herself across Melanie’s whole body, arms around her shoulders and face buried in the crook of her neck. “They’re too sectioned off.”

“I’m not even going to ask what you mean by that.”

Helen hummed again. “The individual notes and themes and things have smooth edges, so they all fit together, but there’s no intent in it. That’s why they get stuck in your head, because they’re just made of basic human pieces.”

“Babe, I have no idea what you mean.”

Helen sat up, freeing Melanie from the suffocating embrace of two long meters of Helen and hair. “Each little part of the song is like a tiny packet of human-brain-stuff, and they just stick together all the pieces that hook onto your brain and stay there forever.” She gestured as she spoke, long fingers curling into elaborate and slightly impossible shapes. She was beautiful right now in the glow of the TV, curls escaping from her bun and freckles popping out over the bridge of her nose. Helen moved fluidly, arms and back and shoulders coming together like a dance to a silent beat.

“You’ve lost me completely. But I get it, you don’t like the commercials.” Helen and Melanie both had some trouble getting their points across to other people, albeit for different reasons, so they’d learned early on that it was often better to let the other just talk herself out. A relationship like this didn’t need any logical understanding. It went beyond that, but at the same time, they both knew this wasn't meant to be forever. Helen wasn’t Georgie, and Melanie wasn’t someone who could keep up with an Avatar of insanity for all of eternity. Even so, what they had was fun and familiar and safe, and Helen was just as starved for all that as Melanie. They made it work and didn’t sweat the details. 

Helen sat back as the ad break ended. “Ads and ad jingles are the work of Es Mentiras, but also the Web. The line gets blurred and, contrary to popular belief, I do not like it when that happens.

“You want to know exactly where your turf begins and ends, and you don’t want to be manipulated.”

“Exactly. The Spiral may be insanity, but even it has borders. One must, in order to have complete freedom.” Helen huffed out a frustrated sigh.

“What do you mean?” This topic seemed worth exploring, typical rules be damned. 

“In order to exist on my own terms, I must have a set of uncrossable lines. Conditions that must always be met, patterns that must be followed. They don’t exist in me, that would be a contradiction, which is in itself a contradiction because my absence of contradictions is a rule, but the world around me must have order so that my disorder may exist. Because I cannot be defined, I define myself by my surroundings. That’s how I became Helen. Even this, the thing you’re talking to now, is a frame for an impossible picture.” Helen had a faraway look in her eyes, which filled with spirals over the course of her monologue. She rocked back and forth a bit, reaching out with every gesture. Melanie thought of things you can never allow yourself to be.

“That seems nice. But what do you do when you get out of control, or the world around you gets out of control? Then you have nothing to go on but your own definition of yourself?” Melanie reached over and muted the television.

Helen went quiet for a moment. “Well, I guess we can’t all just get new bodies when things go belly up, can we?” She laughed, echoing and strange. 

“No, we can’t.” Melanie wondered if that was the source of Michael’s identity problems and Helen’s strange detachment. The strain of trying to maintain an identity while being replaced with something so much bigger than that was something she knew intimately, and she knew how it could warp someone, make them think they weren’t something anymore. But then again, Helen wasn’t imagining things or blowing them out of proportion, she really was a personal acting as a framework for a thing. A thing that existed in the spaces between logic and definability. She was doing her best to hold on to whatever she could, and an identity based on the world around you was still an identity, after all. 

Melanie wasn’t letting herself fall that far. She wasn’t going over the edge, wasn’t going to lose herself so badly that she had to perform metaphysical gymnastics just to exist. Melanie had a very strong idea of who she was, and she was going to continue choosing to be that person until something came along and killed her. She would define herself from the inside out and nothing would ever break her down.

She wondered if Helen Richardson had thought the same thing. 

“Alrighty, that’s enough deep talk for tonight.” Melanie clapped her hands together and reached for the remote, unmuting the television. “Come here, I want to cuddle you.”

Helen obliged, not mentioning the abrupt mood shift as she curled closer. Helen was surprisingly cuddly and soft for an Eldritch being of terror, and her hands weren’t actually sharp unless she wanted them to be. Overall, Melanie would rate her a seven out of ten cuddling partner, with one point off for being excessively long and two points off for extremely poofy hair. Melanie wanted to make the most of her presence before she inevitably disappeared like so many of her friends seemed to be doing lately. Helen would become another memory, she was sure. Things like her simply weren’t built to last, not like this. In the meantime, though, there was no one and nothing around to stop her from holding Helen close and kissing her like the world wasn't ending for one more night.


End file.
